Excerpt from Tales from the Torrid Zone by Alexander Frater, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

*

At dawn I was woken by the ringim. Makau spoke without preamble. “You will eat with us tonight. John and you should be at Iririki wharf by seven o’clock.”

He replaced the phone. I sighed and went back to sleep.

At breakfast a waiter told me that Vanuatu’s Anglophone President was under house arrest.

I looked up from my grapefruit. “What’s he done?”

“He refused to support laws Korman wants.”

Maxime Carlot Korman was the new Francophone Prime Minister. “So what happens now?”

“There will be trouble.”

I called a friend in Port Vila who said he had recently seen the President, Fred Timakata, strolling past the post office. The PM, he added, was just back from Paris, where he mislaid his passport and plane ticket home; he was not in the best of moods. Reports of a rift between President and Prime Minister continued all day. Much bigfala trabol was anticipated.

Nothing happened.

Excerpted from Tales from the Torrid Zone by Alexander Frater Copyright © 2007 by Alexander Frater. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.